


bring me to light

by angel_deux



Category: Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, F/M, Jaime Lannister's little spoon energy, Plane Crashes, after being so annoying about wanting more pegging in this fandom, also ft the unmoving corpse of cleos frey who is mentioned exactly once rip, also i apologize for the lack of pegging, and by the time i realized it i was like well whatever, brief mentions of injuries sustained in plane crashes but i do not talk about it much, but it did in fact turn into that, guess I'll just....steal more plot points from it, i have not been the change i want to see in this world, i will sprinkle in the fact that jaime's bi, is this a The Mountain Between Us AU? Well...not on purpose, jaime also has big ACAB energy, like it's 'i have a boo boo' levels of description, no real worldbuilding just making goldcloaks and kingsguard fancy cops, oh my god they were exes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-28
Updated: 2020-12-28
Packaged: 2021-03-11 00:20:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 11,353
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28386138
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/angel_deux/pseuds/angel_deux
Summary: Jaime has always been terrible at denying his ex anything, which is why he agrees to fly her and her coworker to the Wall even though a massive blizzard has grounded every other flight.That turns out to be a mistake.Or: an accidental The Mountain Between Us AU except they're exes.
Relationships: Jaime Lannister/Brienne of Tarth
Comments: 28
Kudos: 197
Collections: JB Festive Festival Exchange 2020





	bring me to light

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Dialects_and_Costumes](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Dialects_and_Costumes/gifts).



> here is my submission for the super chill chillfest that slips graciously put on for us :). Hilariously/tragically, I had a different plot in mind initially, and it would have featured both bi Jaime and pegging, and when I desperately whined in discord about not knowing if my giftee was cool with that, the ONLY PERSON WHO RESPONDED was my lovely giftee, who was very much cool with bi Jaime and pegging. And then I...changed my whole plot idea. SO I still sprinkled in a bit of bi Jaime, and you can take this as confirmation that Jaime DOES, in fact, get pegged, even if I don't actually write about it, and thank you for making me feel powerful for 5 minutes when you responded lmaooo

His hand is on fire. The rest of him is frozen.

There is a woman above him shouting his name. _I’m awake_ , he wants to say. He doesn’t. He’s too tired to speak. The wind is whipping her hair around her face, and his chest aches, for some reason, to see it.

* * *

Brienne doesn’t speak to him for the first full day. Not when he’s awake, anyway. Jaime drifts. She gave him something for the pain, he remembers, but she didn’t tell him what it was. That would have meant talking to him. She’s angry with him, he thinks. He’s angry with her for being angry with him, so the silence suits him fine. Every time he wakes up, she is there, just out of reach. Bustling. Keeping herself busy. The wind is loud, thrumming and throbbing in his ears, but it does not touch him, and he is not awake enough to figure out why. His hand hurts. Then it doesn’t. Then it does again. He wakes himself shouting, dreaming of the way the breath was sucked out of him when the plane went down.

* * *

She keeps a small fire burning through the night.

They’re somewhere in the mountains, beyond the Wall. He has no idea where. He knows where they were when the storm hit them. He knows where they were when he tried desperately to get out of it. But they could be miles in any direction. They’re on a mountain. There are so many mountains beyond the Wall that it’s not even worth speculating. All that matters is that they’re so far from where they’re supposed to be that he just keeps thinking _fucked_ over and over. He was trying to get around the storm. He failed.

The storm is still going, dumping snow on them. The wind that brought them down hasn’t abated. Up here, at the peak of this mountain onto which he has stranded them, its howls sound alive and monstrous. She must have dragged him inside the body of the wrecked plane, because he remembers waking in snow, but now he is reclined against one of the passenger seats. She has propped him up. His eyes sting with smoke from the fire. Brienne ties up a tarp as a kind of makeshift door, and the storm sends it clapping. A percussive accompaniment to the howling wind. It’s horrible.

He somehow sleeps, too dizzy to stay awake.

Brienne started the fire somehow, with some miracle, and she keeps it going by carefully destroying anything flammable that they don’t need. He wants to tell her not to bother. They’re going to freeze sooner or later. It might as well be tonight. He doesn’t say it.

In the morning, she tries to dig a grave for Cleos in the frozen snow, and he laughs at her. It’s the first sound either of them have made in hours. She glares at him.

“You _must_ be joking,” he says. His voice is shredded, as if he hasn’t spoken in weeks. He remembers yelling into the headset as the plane went down. Maybe it was more like screaming. 

“Do you have any better ideas?” she asks.

“Focus on the living. That piece of metal there, maybe you could turn that into a sled. Much quicker way of getting down the mountain.”

“You want me to lug you down the mountain on a _sled_?” she asks, outraged. He laughs at her again.

“I didn’t say I would be going with you.”

* * *

She’s angry after that, too. Like he has insulted her by asking her to take care of herself. Maybe he has. He thinks freezing is probably not the worst way to go, though it isn’t very pleasant so far. More pleasant, perhaps, than watching and listening to Brienne rifle through the contents of the plane, growing more frantic as she begins to realize that Jaime has not, in fact, packed a second, smaller plane for emergencies like this.

The snow and wind stopped some time in the night, so Brienne has propped him against the plane outside, to sit in the sun. She has also piled every single spare article of clothing on top of him. There was a blanket in the cockpit. An old, horrible thing. It’s not very warm, and it tickles his nose because she has pulled it right up over his mouth, like tucking in a child. He doesn’t want to move, but he finally has to, pulling it away from his face. His whole arm burns with the effort.

He must make some sound, because Brienne comes storming out of the wreckage. Her hair is still loose, free, longer than it was when he last saw her, a decade ago. Almost as long as his. He holds up his left arm to placate her, the skin of his forearm bared because the sleeve was torn off when Brienne pulled him from the smoldering cockpit. He arches his eyebrows, and she takes the hair elastic off his wrist. She doesn’t thank him. She sets her jaw, and she pulls the blanket back up, and she ties her hair back.

“It’s unbearable,” he says.

“You’re going to freeze.”

“You’re not going to find some magic solution in my plane,” he says. She glares at him. “I _know_ what was in that plane. I kept a very careful inventory. Brienne, whatever you’re looking for… your pack was sucked out miles before we actually crashed. You know this.”

She falters. Nods. Continues to glare at him, because he is pointing out things that she already knows. He understands that that’s probably annoying, but she can’t just continue to linger like this. She doesn’t have time.

She stalks away, but he knows she’s thinking about it. He can still read her well enough.

* * *

She makes a sled, ripping pieces of metal sheeting off the wreckage and tying everything together with frayed wiring. She does this like it’s simple, like it’s not one of the most incredible things Jaime has ever seen. She packs the sled with the seating from his plane. His plane. It hasn’t hit him yet that he lost his plane. He’s probably also lost his life, all things considered, but it’s a delayed loss, and the plane is easier to focus on. More finite.

He watches her. She’s buried in fabric. The puffy coat she was wearing when she showed up at his hangar. The black ski pants. The enormous, fur-lined boots. And all of it is covered in snow. He can’t see her muscles, but he can remember them, and he can still admire how strong she is, and how hard she works, and how she _endures_. She never seems to run out of energy. She chops at the seats with the small camp axe she got from under the pilot’s seat. Jaime’s seat. She has turned her mind off. He can tell. Jaime thinks he should talk to her, but he doesn’t know what to say. He didn’t know what to say when she showed up in his hangar and begged him for a favor he knew he shouldn’t have granted. He knows even less what to say now that they’re stuck here.

He should have listened to his own instincts and not the pleading eyes of his ex, but he has always been a fool for her, and her blue eyes have not gotten any easier to resist. _We’re covering a story at the Wall_ , she said, _and no one will take us because of the storm_.

Her eyes said it was important, and so he listened to her, and he bundled she and Cleos into his plane, hoping to be able to get over the mountains before the worst of the weather. But it turns out there was a good reason why Brienne and Cleos couldn’t get any other flights out to the Wall, and that was because most sane pilots don’t mess with unpredictable blizzards.

“I warned you,” he says eventually. Brienne stops hacking at the metal frame of the seat. She’s been using pieces to reinforce the padding on the side. He has a sinking feeling that she plans to make the sled as sturdy as she can and then just fling herself off the edge of the mountain in it.

“You did,” she says. Her voice is clipped.

“I told you we might go down.”

“You did.”

“So this is at least as much your fault as it is mine.”

She is staring at him, but he can’t see her eyes behind the cracked goggles she wrestled out of Cleos’s pack. She strides forward. An abominable snowwoman, and she crouches in front of him.

“I don’t blame you, Jaime,” she says. Her voice is calm. Calmer than she’s been this entire time. They only have food enough for two more days, if they stretch it, and they’re both already running on fumes. They are so far off course that it would take a genuine miracle for someone to find them in time. And still she is calm. He has forgotten that about her, somehow. That she grows calmer the more the world around her goes to shit.

* * *

He thinks it was a lie.

It has to have been a lie, because she’s shoving him into that little sled, and he’s in pain again. Shivering, in pain. She has everything useful tied up in that tarp, just behind him. It’s the world’s clumsiest dog sled, but there are no dogs to pull them.

“This is pointless,” he says.

“Shut up,” she replies.

“It’s going to slow you down.”

“I don’t care.”

She doesn’t speak again, and neither does he. He remembers how useless it is to try and argue with Brienne. She tucks the blanket around him. He’s surrounded by the foam seating, and he’s strapped in. His leg is starting to throb, too. He can’t remember what happened to it. The hand has pulled most of his focus, because it throbs louder and hurts more and because Brienne looked afraid when she saw it. For the first time, _he’s_ afraid. He wasn’t even very afraid when the plane went down, he doesn’t think. Not real fear, not like this. It was panic, maybe, an adrenaline rush of a feeling that didn’t have time to transmute into words, but now it’s words, and it’s creeping. Dread. _We’re going to die up here_ , he thinks.

Brienne doesn’t think so. Or, if she does think so, she’s doing her best to pretend she doesn’t. She tightens the straps around him. She checks her own handiwork. It seems to Jaime like this sled is going to fall apart the second they start down the mountain, but he doesn’t say anything, because he can’t, because he has learned his lesson with Brienne. She doesn’t want his opinions or his negativity. She has no use for them. He’s afraid, but mostly he thinks that he’s afraid for her. He knows her. Knew her, maybe. She might be a very different person ten years on than he thinks, but there is something about Brienne that is _constant_. And she has always been so drawn to the idea of _helping_. Of running into danger to save others. Even if it’s hopeless.

Between his hand and his leg, Jaime thinks it’s hopeless. If they were closer to help, maybe he’d have a shot. But they’re so far off course now that even if someone _does_ ever find them, it’ll be months from now, and it’ll have to be a total fucking accident.

If Brienne can get down off this mountain, she might stand a chance, but she won’t. Not as long as he’s still alive.

* * *

There is nothing more frightening or more thrilling than when Brienne starts to steer the sled down the mountain. She chooses the gentlest slope, and they aren’t even moving very fast, but the terrain is unfamiliar to Jaime, and so the entire time he’s waiting for the snow to collapse beneath them and send them avalanching down the side. Or he’s expecting the sled to pick up too much speed, getting quickly out of Brienne’s control, ripping itself out of Brienne’s hands and sending him on his merry way.

It doesn’t.

It picks up speed, but Brienne controls it. He doesn’t know how she manages to make it seem so easy, and he doesn’t understand how she can be so calm. He supposes he might find it thrilling, if he was more awake, more himself, not half frozen and in pain and still a bit loopy from whatever medication Brienne has been giving him. He was an adrenaline junkie once. That was part of why he even got his pilot’s license. He supposes it was probably part of why he started dating around after he got out of the Kingsguard. He spent his late teens and early twenties locked in an organization that prized chastity and moderation and self-denial. His late twenties and early thirties were for unlearning that behavior, and maybe he leaned a little hard in the opposite direction.

Now, he’s on the wrong side of forty, and he supposes he is back where he started. Not that he’s any more a model of self-denial than he was when he was young, but he likes quieter things than he used to. He likes his small cabin just north of Winterfell. He likes the neighbors who live close enough for visits but far enough that he feels secluded when he wants to. He likes a hot cup of coffee in the morning and sitting on his front porch and sipping it. A far cry from the man he was when he first met Brienne. He wonders if she realizes that about him, or if she thinks he’s the same man she left.

* * *

They make good progress before nightfall. Brienne starts looking out for shelter early, and the sun is still up when she declares that they should stop. There’s this little overhang, a rocky cliff. At least it will offer some protection from the wind. Brienne slams down the brakes she made—these spikes of metal that serve as crampons for the sled in back. The sled drags to a halt, and Brienne pulls it manually the rest of the way, after having Jaime get out. His leg nearly buckles under him, but he doesn’t let her see it. He leans up against the rocky cliff behind him. Everything is numb, and then his legs start to tingle with pins and needles that quickly turn sharp and painful. At least he isn’t frozen. The blankets and packs and supplies piled around him have kept him warm enough. He wonders about Brienne.

She pulls the sled in front of the overhang and props it up on its side and starts to pack snow around it. He understands what she’s doing. He joins her in turning their sled into a kind of lean-to, scooping snow as best as he can with his one good hand. His right hand stays clutched to his chest, like a bird with an injured wing. He sees Brienne noticing it. He sees her frowning with concern. She doesn’t say anything, and he neither does he. Together, they pack the snow around the sled so that the wind will not knock it over, and then they have a shelter. Almost.

There is one sleeping bag. Neither of them are as young or as juvenile as they were, so they don’t talk about it. Jaime doesn’t even make a single joke. Brienne looks at him with concern for _that_ , too, and Jaime tries to think of something that might make her roll her eyes and think he’s fine. He can’t. Words slip past him, evade him. He’s tired.

* * *

Brienne is warm, in the sleeping bag. It’s half-unzipped to fit both of them in it, and their lower bodies are tangled and pressed together. She helped him strip off his top layer, pulling the ski pants gently down over his injured leg, before they went to sleep. She rolled up the underlayer to check, and she declared that his leg looked better, but he’s not sure he believes her. He pretended to. He didn’t want to look, himself.

He was too tired to say anything or do anything by the time they maneuvered themselves into the sleeping bag. That awful old blanket. Brienne pulled it over the two of them. They were still in their puffy winter coats, so it was a bit like trying to snuggle with someone in a ball pit. It felt ridiculous, but Jaime slept, and now he’s awake. The sky is clear tonight, no clouds, very little wind, and he’s watching Brienne’s face, lit by the moon. She looks like she could be dead, and he remembers a nightmare he had, once, years ago, when they were still together. She’d been pale like this, and he had awoken with a start. It was connected to something else, some memory from his days in the Kingsguard, seeing something he didn’t want to remember. Another body. She’d asked him what the dream was about, and he had not been able to tell her. Like talking about it would make it real.

Had he dreamed this? Dreamed of their future? They’re going to die here.

But sleep has a way of clouding his mind, and when the fog lifts, it lifts his panic, too. He watches Brienne’s breath rise and fall. He watches the mist that comes out of her mouth. He breathes deeply, and he calms himself. He has to pee. He struggles out of the sleeping bag. Brienne wakes up, blinks at him blearily. He remembers that night after the dream, when she pulled him close and let him lie against her chest while she stroked up and down his arm. It’s the little things like that that hurt to remember the most. The little softnesses. He has missed her, yes. Missed all of her. But missing the softer things is different. It’s like a physical ache.

“I have to…” he says, and she nods, and she sits up, and she rubs the sleep from her eyes. Her hair is tousled, sticking up everywhere. He wants to smile at her and smooth it down. Like he can erase the decade that separated them.

“Me too,” she says. “Don’t go far.”

When they reconvene, Brienne looks more awake, and she looks at the moon, judges its position.

“Not long before sunrise,” she says. “We should eat something.”

He wishes he had ignored nature’s call and tried to sleep. He misses the warmth of her legs against his. The skin of her calf. Her thighs. Her long, pale legs. She’s already back in three layers of clothing, and everything is hidden away. He nods.

“Sure,” he says. She packs the sleeping bag away, because he can’t. She pulls out their rations—snacks from the pack that Cleos left behind when he died—and she passes him his portion, because he can’t do that either. He can eat a granola bar with one hand, though, and so he does that, even though it’s tough and chewy from being frozen. He doesn’t complain. He’s too tired to do that. By the time they’re done, the sky is starting to lighten.

* * *

Twelve years ago, Brienne walked into his gym.

It wasn’t his gym in the sense that he owned it, but he _did_ live above it, and his ex Addam _was_ the manager, so it felt like his. He took too much interest in new patrons, and Brienne had a way of drawing the eye. She was tall and broad, and her strength was obvious in her muscles and in the way she carried herself. Addam rolled his eyes.

“You’re lucky you look like you do,” he said.

“I’m not being a creep. Just… _look_ at her.”

“It’s impolite to stare,” Addam said absently, in the tone of, well, a very patient, very used-to-this ex, which was exactly what he was.

“I’m not staring,” Jaime said, which wasn’t true. “I’m gonna go introduce myself.”

“You don’t work here.”

“And I’m not going to tell her I do! I just want to meet her.”

For years afterward, even after Jaime and Brienne went their separate ways, Addam would crow about how it was a minor miracle they ever ended up on a single date, after that. But the truth was that they liked each other. Maybe not right away. Maybe Brienne didn’t like him at first. Maybe he prickled about her own defensiveness and maybe it made _him_ defensive, and maybe there _was_ something miraculous in the fact that they eventually warmed to each other. But they liked each other. They enjoyed spending time together. Brienne was more reserved about her enjoyment, but it was _there_. He learned to read it, and to understand.

* * *

He reads her worry now, mostly. _It’s like riding a bike_ , he thinks, because some clichés are clichés for a reason, and that’s exactly what it feels like. He has tried to forget her. Tried being the key word, because it’s an impossible thing. She has always been different to him in a way that frightened him, even years since he’d last spoken to her. He would get these sense memories of her, and he would feel an emptiness. A longing. Like something had been cut short between them.

Technically it had been, he supposes, but he carries the blame for that within himself, and most of the time, it feels like a closed book. But it’s a closed book that remains one of his favorites, so occasionally he takes it off the shelf, lovingly turns the pages, remembers reading it for the first time. Remembers loving it. To have her in front of him again now is a shock. To have her here, brusque and competent and never saying much but always feeling. It’s like finally rereading snatches of sentences from that old book and remembering exactly why he’d loved it so much in the first place.

Brienne wears her worry close. He sees her watching the skyline. Looking at the mountains. Looking at the terrain in front of them. He can imagine her calculating distances and travel times, and he knows that every answer she comes up with will be grim. But she’ll run them again and again until she exhausts herself looking for any possible opportunity to make those numbers different.

He has always known her, and he knows that she won’t leave him behind even though she should, and he cannot be angry with her for it. Angry on his own behalf, maybe. He wants her to take care of herself because he does not want her to die out here. But he knows her.

* * *

They do not find adequate shelter by the time the sun goes down the next night. The world around them is darkening and growing increasingly dreary by the time they reach a small copse of dead gray trees. To see trees at all is a good sign, Jaime knows. They’ve made good progress. Still, it isn’t much. Brienne stops pushing the sled, too exhausted to take another step. Jaime makes her take his place in the sled, and she doesn’t protest. He collects branches from the dead trees, low-hanging enough to reach. His leg throbs with every step, and his wrist is killing him. But the cold has a way of numbing everything, and he’s grateful for it.

Brienne is asleep when he returns to the sled, but she wakes when she hears his footfalls, and he can see her eyes wide and wild when she jerks up, blinking into the darkness.

“It’s me,” he says, and she relaxes again, but does not fall back asleep. She watches him pile the wood. She doesn’t get up. She must be exhausted. “What are our odds?” he asks mildly.

“Don’t,” she says. He almost keeps going anyway, because he _must_ , because she needs to understand. But she sounds too tired. He can’t. He sighs. He rubs his left hand over his face. He’s becoming used to only using the one.

He still remembers his basics from his Kingsguard training, and that include all sorts of shit about wilderness survival that has been useless in every other moment of his life except this one. He can feel Brienne watching him, and he wonders if she’s thinking about it, too. He said once that he knows he can never escape the Kingsguard completely. He said how it sinks into a person, warps them from the inside, makes them gradually accept more and more horrible shit until they’re rotten to the core. Obviously, building a fire doesn’t fall under that category. But it’s what the fire _represents_. A past he wishes that he could forget, but _can’t_. He almost asks, then. _Why didn’t you become a Goldcloak like you wanted_? But he can’t. However gently he asks it, it will feel like gloating, and that’s not what he wants.

When the fire is built and burning steadily, Brienne rouses and pulls their food out of the bag. When he has eaten everything she gives him, he finds that it hasn’t lessen the gnawing hunger in his stomach at all. He doesn’t say anything about that, either.

* * *

They sleep in the sled, pressed together. There’s barely any room. Neither of them bother to take off any layers, unlike last night, and they don’t get into the sleeping bag. Brienne just unzips it and drapes it over them both. They use her pack as a shared pillow. They’re wedged so tightly that it should be claustrophobic, but it isn’t. He feels absurdly safe. There are wolves, howling in the distance, but none close enough to make them worry.

“Food,” Brienne says. “I’ll need to find us food.”

He nods sleepily and doesn’t say anything.

“But where are we going to find it?” she asks. He shakes his head. She stews in silence until she falls asleep.

* * *

The next morning, she’s gone, and Jaime panics.

He asked her to go. Told her that it was the smart thing to do. Only stopped pestering her about it because he could see that it was getting genuinely upsetting her, and he doesn’t want to do that. But she’s gone, and he feels this punch in his gut. This disbelief. He wanted her to go. Asked her to go. She’s gone.

She left him the first time, too. She told him she was going to, and then she did. He wasn’t surprised. It was just that he was able to pretend that it wasn’t happening when he was at work, and then he came home and found she’d carved herself surgically out of his apartment, leaving empty spaces. A blank spot on the wall where photographs of her family had been hanging. Her favorite pillow gone from the bed. Her throw blankets. Drawers empty. Mugs taken from the cabinet. Carefully removing every evidence of herself and leaving those empty spaces where he could see them. A constant reminder, until weeks later he finally shifted his own things to cover them up. Hung up a piece of art. Bought new pillows. Moved the mugs around in the cabinet so it didn’t seem so empty. Those holes were still there, but he didn’t think about them as much. Didn’t have to look at them and remember how cleanly she did it. As if he mattered so little.

But this is different. The pack is gone, but she left the blanket and sleeping bag with him. She tucked it securely over his shoulders, and it just doesn’t track. Her leaving. It made sense, the first time. He had known it was coming.

“I just need you to support me in this,” she had said.

“I can’t,” he had replied. “Not the way you want me to.” And that was that, and she had nodded and told him that she was moving out, and he said that he understood.

Jaime hasn’t been called mature often in his life, but every time he found himself mentioning the breakup…maybe it _does_ seem mature from the outside, but he was always surprised when people said it. Admiring, scornful, amused, annoyed. _What a mature breakup_. Was it mature? It didn’t feel it, at the time. It felt like he was sabotaging his only chance at happiness, but he couldn’t stop himself. Couldn’t just _lie_. Couldn’t just _pretend_. Everything else was perfect. Why had he chosen _then_ , of all times, to become stupidly noble about something like that?

And this time…

It’s selfish, but he keeps thinking, _she wouldn’t_. He wanted her to. Begged her to. Knew she wouldn’t. He felt abandoned when she left the first time. Abandoned further when she showed up ten years later and flashed a reporter’s badge at him instead of a shiny Goldcloak or Kingsguard ID. But even when he _felt_ abandoned, he knew that he had not been. Brienne had made her choices, and he had made his, and it had been, by all accounts, a mutual thing. She needed something he could not provide. He was too prideful or too smug or too fucking sure of himself to relent and give it to her. They parted ways. That it broke his heart didn’t make it any less mutual. That it was mutual didn’t make it any less painful. But he had not been abandoned.

He hasn’t been abandoned now. He’s certain of it. But as the hours drag on, and the pain starts to set in his wrist and makes it difficult to think, he worries.

He knows Brienne. She wouldn’t have left if she didn’t think she would be back safely before he woke. She would not have left him here for this long unattended. Something has happened.

His leg throbs with every step, but he walks. He pushes the sled in front of himself, because if he finds Brienne injured, he knows he won’t be able to drag her back here. His legs burn with the effort, and his arms. He can hardly feel anything from the cold. But it’s Brienne, so he must.

He follows her footprints in the snow. They are deep, strong, steady. They are Brienne. They incline down the gentle slope. They are still on the mountain, but nearing the bottom, and he worries and wonders about cliffs, appearing suddenly. Ravines buried in the snow. She could have fallen in.

The slope steepens. He begins to worry more. He has a harder time keeping the sled from picking up speed. His wrist reaches a point of painful where he hardly even feels it anymore. It’s just hot, and white, and searing. He grits his teeth. His leg gives out.

He lets go of the sled, and he rolls a few times before he’s able to stop himself. The sled continues without him, careening wildly, down the slope, flips, bounces, and then comes to a stop at a small, relatively flat area of land. Jaime staggers to his feet. He puts his hands to his mouth.

“Brienne!” he shouts. The sound echoes. His voice rebounds. Returns to him. Dread is pooling low in his stomach. “Brienne!” he calls again.

The wind is too loud. He cannot hear anything but the wind, and his own voice, and his heartbeat thudding in his ears. He stumbles and trips and slides his way down to the sled, and then he hears it. Her voice, distant. Calling him. He finds her footsteps again, once he has righted the sled. He keeps going.

* * *

It wasn’t that Jaime didn’t support her. He wanted her to be happy. He wanted her to be content. He wanted her to succeed. All of those things were true, but he also knew the Goldcloaks better than she did, and he knew the Kingsguard, too. He had been Kingsguard for years, and he had worked with the Goldcloaks, and he saw the way that it poisoned every one of those new recruits who showed up shiny and ready to protect the innocent.

“It’s not something that can be fixed from the inside,” he told her once, and she had shaken her head at him and called him a bitter old man, in that half-joking way she did sometimes. She wanted him to be quiet, he knew. Stop talking about it. Stop dismissing her dream. She wanted to do good. She wanted to help people. He wanted that for her too, but the Goldcloaks were never going to be the way to do it, and it was a slow-acting poison between them, the fact that she had rosy expectations and good memories and good experiences and the fact that she didn’t understand _how_ he got so bitter, and didn’t even try to.

Ten years on, he’s sure he could have done things differently. He had heard his own patronizing tone when he described the things he had seen, and he had heard her own worshipful descriptions of her father’s past as Tarth’s Chief of Police, and how her old best friend Renly Baratheon was a cop, too. He died stupidly and nobly, and he made himself golden to her. Untouchable. The Goldcloaks are the biggest force for justice on the continent, the people who keep King’s Landing safe. If you ask _them_ , anyway.

Brienne is not a person who clings to ideals for the sake of them. She is a person who is deeply grounded in the people in her life, and in wanting to live up to them, and in wanting to support them and love them. He knew that about her then, and he supposes he still knows it now. She saw the good in people, and she saw the good that they did, and she wanted to be like them. Jaime understood even more because he had been the same way, as a boy. It was why he worked so hard. Why he ended up training under Arthur Dayne, why he ended up as the youngest Kingsguard ever. An agent specially trained to protect the life of the king. He’d thought it was everything he wanted.

But what do you do when the king is a monster? What, when you swore to protect him? What do you do when you see Goldcloaks taking bribes and handing out bribes and prosecuting the wrong people and planting evidence? What do you do when the other Kingsguard look the other way and say that it’s for the good of the king, the good of the realm, that these injustices happen? What do you do if you let the years pass, and more and more it piles up on you, and you know that you could have maybe helped them, any of them, but instead you stood by and let it happen, because you swore a vow, and because that vow meant more to you than justice?

What you did, apparently, was leave in a blaze of glory, tossed out on your ass, and spend the next twenty years desperately trying to forget.

He knew, even when he was telling Brienne all of it, he knew that she would not listen. He knew that he couldn’t control her, couldn’t make her choices for her, couldn’t fight her battles. He knew, but he had wanted to help her see so _badly_. He told her everything, and she told him that she wouldn’t be like them, and she wouldn’t be like him. She would be better, and stronger, and she would change things.

He wishes, still, that he had been able to believe her. But it had been too fresh, back then, and he had been angry, and he had been cutting and biting and cruel because he wanted her to _listen_. It hadn’t worked at all. She had not wanted to give up on her dream. She gave up on him, instead.

Even now, even still, he thinks she probably made the right choice, but he couldn’t deny the flood of relief that went through him when she introduced herself as a reporter instead.

* * *

Her tracks lead him over the edge. A steep drop, but not a very long one. She’s standing at the bottom. Her hair is mussed, wet, already half-frozen. Her eyes are very blue, and her skin is very pale, and she’s looking up at him with naked relief.

She has a fire built. She’s cooking fish.

“I fell,” she says, laughing, near-hysterical. Brienne is not a woman who laughs very often. She is a more private, quiet sort. She laughs with the people she feels truly close to, and he remembers with an ache the first time she laughed quietly at something he said, and the way his heart soared with it.

“Are you all right?” he asks.

“Yes. I just couldn’t get back up. I thought…” She shakes her head. Laughs at herself again. She is so much more free than she was a decade ago, and she lights up all these sparks inside his brain that he doesn’t know how to grab on to, or how to read. _Gods_ , he keeps thinking. _Look at her_.

He doesn’t tell her that he thought she had left him. He doesn’t tell her that he thought it was the right idea. He just smiles down at her, and he looks for an easier way down.

There isn’t one, it turns out. Not without going a long way out of his way, and Brienne made it down all right, so they work together to lower the sled, and then Jaime lets himself fall. She half-catches him to ease his way, and they land sprawled beside each other in the snow, and then he’s laughing. Pain tingles up and down his arm from where he jarred his injured wrist, but still he is laughing, and so is she. He thinks for a second that it might be hypoxia, but no, they aren’t nearly high up enough for that, and he knows this feeling for what it is. Relief. Just…relief to see her again. It’s odd. He used to feel it every time she came home, back when they lived together, for that short, blissful time. Like every time she left, he’d assumed, in some shameful, secret part of himself, that she had left for good. That she would disappear without telling him.

Of course, even when she _did_ leave, she told him ahead of time. She warned him. She let him know. They talked it over, and the breakup was as mutual as a breakup could be when it was one party wanting to end it and the other thinking he’d die if she left. It never was that sharp, aching jolt of nothing that he had expected.

“You caught fish,” he says.

“Yes,” she replies. Still lying on her back, staring up at the sun, still half-laughing as she speaks. “When I realized I couldn’t get back up, I kept going down. I thought I’d scout ahead. There’s a stream.”

“And you just…caught fish. How?”

“Carefully,” she says, and he laughs again, and he does this truly irresponsible thing and nuzzles his nose into her neck. It’s an odd, automatic, unthinking gesture. They used to lie beside each other in bed and talk about their days and laugh together, and he would do it. Press his nose into the soft, warm skin. Press a kiss to that sensitive skin just below her ear. She would shiver and laugh and turn and kiss him, and she almost does it this time. He can tell. He can feel the shiver. Can feel her turning towards him. And then she freezes. He’s such a fool. He’s a fool, but he’s injured, and they might die up here, and she is a marvel. He wonders if she understands that, yet. She didn’t, before.

“You’re amazing,” he says. She is used to his laughing insincerity. Even in the past few days, she has become used to the careful distance between them, he thinks. She isn’t used to this. This earnestness. He’d tried it out a few times, when they were together. Telling her exactly what he thought, without dressing it up with a laugh or deflecting just in case she thought his sincerity awful. She’d always looked at him exactly like she’s looking at him now. Like she’s not sure what to think, but like she would listen to him say it forever. He wonders if she realizes that he would, gladly. “Really. I mean it. No one else could have gotten me down this far.”

“We’re going to make it,” she tells him. Steady, as always. He thinks of the implacability of mountains and forest streams and the cold, beautiful land up here, beyond the Wall. He thinks of her helping him. Pulling him out of the wreckage of his plane. He thinks of her building that sled. How had he ever expected that she would leave without him? Of course she wouldn’t.

“I believe you,” he says.

* * *

They camp that night by the stream, and for the first time in days, Brienne looks at his wrist. He doesn’t. He watches the water flowing, and he listens to Brienne’s quiet humming. She wraps it more carefully afterward, and when he looks at her, she smiles.

“I think it’s broken,” she tells him, and he laughs. “But it’s not as bad as I feared.”

She has been afraid to look at it too, he realizes, and he feels the heat of that in his face. The reminder.

Of course, her care is in everything. She has always shown her care this way. Quietly helping. Supporting. She has as much difficulty with words as he does, although her difficulty lies in a different direction. Jaime will say a thousand words before he gets to the point. Brienne can barely force out ten. An exaggeration, maybe, but only just.

“Thank you,” he says. She squirms uncomfortably and adds another couple of sticks to the fire, and she goes to check the lines that she has set up in the small stream. They have already eaten their fill of fish, but she’s worried, he knows. She wants to be prepared.

Before the sun sets, he looks back up at the mountain. They are off the steepest part of it now, and it seems like they are out of danger, but they aren’t. They’re still so far from anyone. They’re still so far off course. But it feels less dangerous than it did, and he cannot help but to feel the lightness of hope.

Not that it ever truly went away. Not with Brienne beside him.

* * *

They bathe in the stream, before the sun sets fully. It’s freezing, but the fire is right there. Jaime’s leg is still a worrying, bruised color, but it holds his weight. Brienne helps him. They’re both completely naked. It’s an odd thing. Odd because it doesn’t feel odd at all. It feels comfortable. They laugh at themselves, and they laugh at each other. A weight has been lifted off Brienne, and she feels less tense, less angry. They wash their clothes in the stream, too, and they leave them to dry by the fire, and then they climb into their sleeping bag in only their underthings, and there is nothing odd about it. There is almost nothing sexual. Jaime still looks at her and sees her muscles and _wants_ her, but it’s odd how chaste it is. Like they have been together all these years. When the first got together, it was like a fire within him. A hunger for her always. Now, it’s a soft, gentle wave. Like his body thinks they have time, even though he knows they don’t. They are wrapped up in each other in the sleeping bag, and he wants to press his lips to her throat, and her cheek, and her forehead, just to feel it, just to feel the warmth and softness of it. He doesn’t. But his skin is pressed against hers, and her hands are steady on his back. Strong, steady, perfect. He can feel her heartbeat, and her breath, and they are alive, and he has missed her.

* * *

Two days later, they find the cabin.

It’s large, which is a good sign. No one has been to it in a while, which is less of one. The storm was a few days ago, and there are no tire tracks in and out, and the snow around it is unbroken by human footfalls. Animal tracks are abundant, which makes Brienne look a little lighter. And they followed the stream here, so there will still be fish.

Brienne breaks the door open while Jaime watches, enamored. Remembering her strength. Watching it play out. He laughs at her when she seems sheepish about it afterward.

There’s a generator, and Brienne gets it working while Jaime investigates. He’s tickled by the idea of the owners of the home coming back and finding two squatters. It seems like a vacation home. Everything is covered in white sheets. He pulls off the ones covering the couches and finds them nice, ornate. A rich person’s vacation home, all the way out here, beyond the Wall.

There’s canned food in the pantry. He nearly weeps. There’s a _lot_ of canned food in the pantry, and dry goods, and fucking candy. He finds the stairs to a cellar that contains _more_ food, along with essential household items. He laughs aloud, almost dizzy with relief.

There is phone on the wall, but even when Brienne gets the electricity working, there is no dial tone. He supposes they should be grateful for the miracle they have been handed.

When Brienne enters the cabin, she looks around with a mystified, giddy expression that matches Jaime’s thoughts exactly. It feels like they are children who have been unleashed in an abandoned shopping mall. “There’s food,” he says, and he watches the way the relief of that makes her body loose, her muscles uncoil. He hates that he cannot offer her more than this. Just a statement of what she would have figured out soon enough on her own anyway. Still, he is selfishly glad. When they were together, it felt the same. Like he wasn’t giving her enough. Maybe that was why he tried so hard to get her to see. If he’d loved her less, maybe he would have let her learn on her own. Or maybe it wouldn’t have been less. Maybe it just would have been different. But his love has always been buried in protection. In wanting to make things easier for the people he loves. Maybe it was inevitable. Maybe, no matter what, they would have ended. He lives to protect. She lives to show the world that she doesn’t need protection. Maybe it’s just one of those things. Not everyone was built for a happy ending, and maybe that was them. Perfect for a time.

* * *

Brienne builds the fire while Jaime makes something for dinner. Nothing fancy, just the rest of their fish and some pasta and a canned sauce he finds that sounds good. It might as well be gourmet after surviving on granola bars and plain, unseasoned fish cooked over a fire. The mood is oddly melancholy anyway. Like now that they are back in some semblance of civilization, they cannot be the same people they have been as they made their way down the mountain.

Brienne watches him over the candles that he lit. She watches him like she wonders if he remembers their last candlelit dinner. It was an anniversary. They broke up three days later. Of course he remembers, but he won’t tell her that. Not unless she asks.

She doesn’t. It goes unsaid, like everything else. But they are safe, now. The wind is picking up outside, howling, but it doesn’t matter. Brienne said there’s gas enough to keep the generator running for weeks if they use it sparingly, and even if they don’t…there’s a snowmobile in the shed outside. Once the snow starts to melt enough that they can figure out where the road is, it’s only a matter of time before they can get back home, which means they’ll separate again.

He had thought, before, when he was living on his own, that he was happy. Maybe he was. But he was only happy because he had excised Brienne so carefully. Not that he never thought about her, but he never let himself linger. But all he has done the past few days is linger here, in this memory of her. Remembering and longing and yearning in a way that he hasn’t in a long time. He knows he would survive it, if they went their separate ways now without ever talking about it, but he doesn’t want to. It’s not just survival anymore. Maybe that came with age. The defensiveness wearing away and breaking down into something else.

He doesn’t want to spoil their dinner, so he doesn’t. He waits until they’re happily sitting by the fire, on the rug in front of the fireplace, wrapped in downy blankets, drinking coffee together, both of them clutching their cups like it’s liquid gold. There’s a shower on the second floor, and he already told Brienne she could go first, but he likes that they’re taking this moment together, just the two of them

“Brienne,” he finally says. He has spoken to her often in the past few days, but this feels like the first time, and he hates it. Hates the way she seems to notice it, too. She turns to him with surprise, as if she had forgotten he was there. “I’m sorry,” he says.

Her expression does something interesting. It isn’t that she isn’t expressive, normally. But they are smaller, more subtle expressions than most peoples’, he thinks. But he has always been obsessed with Brienne as a uniqueness. Someone not like anyone else. Maybe he’s just biased. Every time he spends any amount of time with her, he is struck with an impulse to turn to the world and shout, “isn’t she extraordinary? Look at her!” But now, her expression crumbles. It does an odd, wounded thing. It’s so open.

“It isn’t your fault,” she says, like he has apologized much more forcefully, much more passionately, than he has. “I shouldn’t have insisted. I should have…there was a reason we couldn’t get a flight out from anyone else.”

He doesn’t understand for a moment, and then he laughs, and he feels like an idiot.

“Oh,” he says. “I shouldn’t have given in. I knew better. But you know me. I can’t resist a challenge.”

He’s not sure how true that is anymore, but it’s better than admitting that he still can’t say no to her. That he still wants to impress her.

“Still,” she says. “I shouldn’t have. Now Cleos is dead, and I…”

“Brienne.” He sounds as exhausted as he is, and maybe that’s why she actually stops. Doesn’t try to keep going. “We can argue about who’s guilty once we’re safe, all right? Not now.”

She nods. He can already see her formulating her arguments in her head. He wishes she wouldn’t. He doesn’t want to think about that. He takes a steady sip of his coffee.

“I meant,” he says, very steadily. “I meant to apologize for…everything. Earlier. What…for not supporting you.”

He’d thought it would sound very mature, apologizing, but of course he couldn’t get it out quite right, and of course it ends up sounding spluttered and idiotic. She’s watching him over her mug, looking at him like she’s trying to figure him out.

“I expected you to mention it,” she says. “When I told you I was a reporter.”

“I thought about it.” He admits it readily enough that it seems to lessen some of the tension in her, and she smiles at him reluctantly.

“I made it two years before I realized that I wasn’t going to be happy there. I…I liked the challenge of it. I wanted to…I wanted them to believe that I could do it. My father was so happy in that job, and he made a difference. I know he did. But Tarth…Tarth wasn’t King’s Landing. You were right.”

He grimaces when she says that, because he knew she would, and hearing it isn’t any more pleasant than he imagined it would be. Sometimes, in his darkest moments after the breakup, he felt a certain level of self-righteousness, knowing that he would be right. Knowing that, in time, she would realize it. But it was never very strong. He was mostly just upset that he hadn’t managed to keep her from it.

“Believe me, I wish I wasn’t,” he says, and Brienne nods. She’s tugging at pieces of her napkin. Ripping it up into tiny pieces. She used to do that a lot when she was nervous, he remembers. She would be talking about her training, or about something that happened, or about something she had learned in classes, and she would tear up her napkin, and he had wondered, even then, if it was because she knew that he disapproved of the path she was choosing to take.

“They all protect each other. They…you told me, before, that it was all silence. Looking the other way. I thought that was just the Kingsguard. Or that you’d only met the worst of the Goldcloaks. Two years. Maybe I knew it sooner. Maybe I was expecting it the entire time, and I only lasted as long as I did because I was trying to convince myself that I was only seeing it _because_ I was expecting it. That I was paranoid. Seeing things that weren’t there.”

“It took me longer,” Jaime points out, and her fingers still on the napkin. She meets his eyes. “Two years is faster than almost anyone figures it out. Lots of people never do.”

“Mm,” she admits. She realizes that she has made a mess, and she starts to tidy it. Her face is slightly pink, and he can’t tell if she’s just flushed from the food and the warmth, but he doesn’t think she is. He is so fond of her, really. He has always been fond of her, and it’s small moments like this where it bleeds through. Most of the time he’s looking at her and admiring her strength, her sturdiness, her form and the beauty he has missed seeing every day. But now, seeing every tiny gesture of her fingers, every little quirk of her eyebrows, every twitch of her lips, he remembers the softer things that he has missed so badly. “I wanted to think that I could make a difference.”

“Maybe you would have,” he concedes.

“You don’t think that.”

“I think if anyone could have done it, it would have been you. But no. I think it would have burned you out.”

“It did,” she points out.

“No it didn’t,” he says, because it hasn’t. He smiles at her when she looks taken aback by that. “You wanted to do good. You wanted to help people. You still do.”

She’s definitely flushing now, and she looks down, and she nods.

“Yes,” she admits. “So I’m sorry. That it took me so long to see it.”

He shakes his head. Shrugs.

“It’s…” he starts, and she sighs.

“Jaime.”

“What? It’s fine.”

“You were right.”

“Stop saying it like that. Like it’s an argument we had over which restaurant to takeout from. I took no pleasure in being right.”

“Not even a little?” she asks, teasing, but he shakes his head.

“No,” he says. It’s honest, and she seems to recognize it. She swallows heavily, and she looks back down at the table.

“I’m helping now,” she says. “And it’s…it’s better than I could have hoped for. I talked to my father about it, after. I thought he’d be disappointed that I left the force so quickly, but he wasn’t. I don’t think he quite understood what I was saying. Why I wanted to leave. But…he wasn’t disappointed. When that was done, I knew it was the right choice.”

“Are you happy?” he asks. She looks at him across the table, surprised.

“Yes,” she says, and he nods. That was all he wanted, really. There was a part of him that burned with righteousness, after leaving the Kingsguard. He wanted to tear the whole institution down. He was so fucking glad to get out of that culture that he would have lit the whole thing on fire if he thought he had the power to do it. He didn’t have that power, though. Normal people didn’t, and despite his entire twenties being spent convinced he was special, he didn’t have that power either. Maybe there was a part of him that hoped that Brienne would be the one to do it. If he couldn’t be with her, maybe at least she could be a blazing torch in the darkness. But she couldn’t, either. He wasn’t surprised. And that wasn’t what he really needed, anyway. He needed her to be happy. He needed her to not burn out. He needed her to not feel the weight of the world so crushingly that it ruined her. He was glad it hadn’t. It had almost ruined him. He should have known that she would be stronger than him. Maybe he did. But he had been so afraid. He remembered well what the burnout had done to him. What it had turned him into, and how it had almost been worse. He got out before it dragged him under completely, but he doesn’t know if he’s ever going to be able to completely forgive himself for the things he let slide before he understood what was happening. He’s glad that she doesn’t have those things, those years, on her conscience. That’s all he could have asked.

“Good,” he says. “I’m glad.”

* * *

The air is charged, then. He knows that something is different. It’s not the fact that they are, for the first time since the crash, safe. It’s not the fact that this feels now like a temporary rest, a transition period between what happened out there and what will happen when they get home. It doesn’t even feel like the fact that they are running out of time. It is something else. It would have felt this charged if they had just met at a restaurant for drinks after years apart and talked about what they just talked about. He knows that they will have to talk about it again. He knows that one conversation won’t fix everything. They are near-strangers now. Years apart. Jaime knows he’s a different person than the man he was when Brienne left him, so he has to assume that she is different, too. But something has been unlocked. Unblocked, maybe. An emotional clog done away with.

Brienne shuts off the generator for the night, and they move wordlessly to the bedroom on the first floor. There are others. Three of them, in fact, but they don’t even discuss the possibility. Why would they? It’ll be cold, with the generator gone.

They curl together in the center of the bed like it’s much smaller than it is. Blankets are piled atop them. It’s warm. The moonlight shines in through the window, and Jaime looks out and sees the blinding white of the snow, and he listens to the wind, and he thinks about how safe they are. Brienne is at his back. He wants to turn over and look at her. He does.

“Do you ever…” he starts, whispering, like they have any reason to be quiet. They could scream and no one would be around to hear it.

“Yes,” she says. He smiles

“You don’t know what I was going to ask.”

“I think about us,” she says. And his smile disappears. “I miss you. I wish things could have been different. I wish I had realized…I wish I hadn’t left.”

He swallows an unexpected lump in his throat. He nods. Brienne works her hand out from under the covers and cups his jaw with it. Her eyes reflect the moonlight beautifully.

“Do you?” he asks.

“Yes,” she says. He nods.

“I miss you too,” he says.

* * *

Things between them stay charged. Brienne puts gas into the snowmobile, and she drives it around. The sound is shocking in the otherwise silence, but it works, and she can drive it. They hook the sled up to it, and Jaime goes a bit green at the thought of putting so much trust in Brienne, to sit in that thing, but he knows he’ll do it. Brienne chops more wood for the fireplace. Jaime cooks lunch, and then dinner. They eat again. They shower. They sit by the fire. He looks at her, and she is looking back at him. Her face is flushed.

They find wine in the cellar, and they drink it. They laugh about old things that they had nearly forgotten. He asks a million questions. _Remember? Remember? Remember that time?_ The answer is always yes, always incredulous, like Brienne doesn’t understand how he thinks she could forget.

She checks his wrist. Her mood lightens. They crawl into bed together, and they hold each other, and neither of them bothers to utter an excuse about the cold. They know what this is. They know why it’s happening. Jaime thinks they are both afraid.

It lasts a week. Regathering their strength. Tending to Jaime’s wounds, and to the less serious scrapes and bruises that Brienne managed to gather. A week, and Jaime could stay in this cabin forever, and that’s how he knows. He cooks dinner. Brienne’s hair is wet from the shower, and her cheeks are pink, and her flush extends down to her neck, just like he remembers.

“Brienne,” he says when they sit down. He doesn’t know how to continue. She watches him. “I don’t…I’m glad you were with me.”

She softens.

“I’m glad as well,” she tells him.

They wash the dishes together. They settle by the fire, like they do every night. She sits beside him, tonight, rather than across from him. He knows why. He watches her carefully, and she turns and looks at him, and her face is still red. He is thrilled.

“Jaime,” she starts.

“I know,” he says.

“It might…aren’t you afraid?”

“Of what?”

“It might not be this easy.”

“I had to crash a plane for this to happen. Of course it isn’t easy.” But he knows what she means, and so his smile is soft, slightly faded. “It might be different when we go back,” he admits. “It might not be easy. But I would rather try and fail. I would rather think that we had given it a shot. And you?”

“Yes,” she says. She holds his face in her hands. She looks down at him. He nods. She kisses him. Tentatively, at first, and then it’s like resettling into those old grooves, those old spaces that she had left behind in him. She fits with him so well. She always has. He grips the collar of her shirt with his left hand, and he pushes himself up to his knees, and she meets him. She is always there, meeting him, kissing him. Pushing up against him. She is so warm, and she is alive, and they are both here. Ten years. That was long enough to wait.

They are injured and tired, and so they make out like teenagers in front of the fire, laughing giddily at the promise of more time stretching out ahead of them. The snows are melting now. Soon, they’ll be able to see the road. They’ll be able to go home. And he knows that she will be there.

* * *

The snows never melt very much up north, beyond the Wall, but they melt enough that Brienne can see the road. She straps Jaime into the sled with a kiss. They’ve brought enough food to last them days, and with the snowmobile, it’s easy enough to carry the load. They have enough gas to refuel several times. Jaime left a very polite note of apology tacked to the front door, along with Tyrion’s name and number for reimbursement information. Brienne had laughed at him when he did, and Jaime had felt a lightness in his chest that does not dissipate even once they’re on the road.

He dozes in the snowmobile, so he misses the moment Brienne pulls into the town. The sun is just beginning to set. She saw the lights through the trees. She shakes him awake, and he sees that they have caused a stir. There are people coming out of a restaurant to gawk at them, to fawn over them, to help them. A _restaurant_. Jaime nearly weeps.

Brienne helps him to his feet, helps him stamp out the pins and needles in his good leg, helps him balance when he needs to put weight on his bad. Everything about it looks effortless. Jaime’s the one who tells the story about what happened, because Brienne is exhausted, because she has never been very good at spontaneous conversation. Not the way that Jaime is, bright and sparkling.

They call in a helicopter to take him to a hospital in Winterfell. He searches out Brienne’s eyes when he hears it approaching.

“I’m with you,” she tells him, before he asks. “I’ll be there.”

* * *

She is.

She is there on the helicopter flight. She is there in the hospital. She kisses him. Reminds him. They are back in the land of the living, back beyond the Wall. They are interviewed. There are cameras on them.

“My ex-girlfriend,” he says once, in front of a news camera, when a reporter asks how they know each other, and she grimaces at him. Fondly annoyed for bringing it up. “My ex-ex-girlfriend,” he says, and she laughs.

Media interest dies down before he’s even released from the hospital, and she’s there for that, too.

She’s there for the guilt and the self-recrimination that hits him. She’s there for the pain of healing injuries and the realization that he isn’t the same person he was when he crashed that plane. She’s there for the difficult conversation with his father, and his brother, and his sister, all of whom had given him up for dead.

And he is there for her.

* * *

When he’s released from the hospital, Brienne is waiting outside for him. There is a yellowing bruise just at her hairline. It’s the only sign that something has happened to her. His eyes light on it immediately. He wants to touch it, so he does. She leans into it, smiles sleepily at him.

“I didn’t realize you’d be here,” he says. She laughs at him.

“You should have,” she says.

“I hoped,” he admits. He gestures down at himself. Freshly showered, freshly shaved. He’s wearing the nicest clothing that Tyrion brought for him. “I prepared.”

“Well, we both know I only like you when you’re at your best,” Brienne says dryly. He grins and pushes up on his toes to kiss her, and she pulls him close. He is not afraid. That’s odd to realize. He was afraid when he first kissed her. He was afraid because he didn’t know what the future would bring. He didn’t know if he could take it, if he got his hopes up and then it didn’t work out. But he isn’t afraid anymore. Maybe it’s faith in them, or maybe it’s just…he knows he can survive it. He survived it once. He survived worse. She’s looking at him like she is now. Not like she needs him, but like she’s glad that he’s here. Glad that he’s alive, and glad that he is on the mend, but most of all just glad that he is back in her life.

He’s glad, too.


End file.
